Home for the Holidays

Saturday my husband and I drove from TN to NJ to come home for the holidays. I've been excited for this time, in respect to blogging, since I was looking forward to writing about all of my holiday experiences. I'm the baker in the family, so every year the first couple days I'm here before the holidays, I park myself in front of the stove and churn out batches and batches of cookies, pies, and cakes. I initially was hoping to write a blog about all of the delicious desserts I made. Instead, I'm going to complain a little bit. I make chocolate chip cookies monthly at my house in TN. I always use the same recipe (having tried many different kinds in an attempt to find the best ever recipe) - Alton Brown's "The Chewy." Its awesome - the cookies are thick, gooey, chewy and delicious. So imagine my surprise when I made a batch here and pulled the first cookies out of the oven - thin, flat, hard, super dark cookies. NOT GOOD. So, of course I assumed that I messed something up and made another batch of dough. Again, the cookies spread and didn't really "bake," but instead just hardened... It was gross. So I went online to foodnetwork.com, found the recipe, and went straight to the comments to see if anyone else had ever had the same experience. I scrolled through the pages of 5 star comments until I came across a 1 star comment. It was from a woman who had made the recipe before and had them come out fine, but the last time she made them she got the same results I had! There was a response to her comment saying that this problem could possibly be caused by using cheap, store brand (Shop Rite brand specificially) butter. I was using Shop Rite butter!! So I took ALL the butter and went to shop rite to exchange it for brand name butter. I got back home, made another batch of chocolate chip cookies, and no luck. The same thing happened. I was so upset that I made a batch of Tollhouse recipe cookies and ate half of them! What a waste of time, ingredients, and money! I have no idea what was wrong - especially since I make these so frequently at home... Anyways, I've since made several more batches of the Tollhouse recipe, Spritz cookies, Ricotta cookies, and Oatmeal Raisin cookies - all of which have turned out just deliciously. Right now I have an apple cake in the oven. That's it for today though. I'll resume baking in the morning tomorrow.